What a coincidence, I have a bid on one of those new-in-box counting down right now. They're pretty interesting. I hear if you can get a turbo head for it, it benefits, being a small-displacement, high-RPM engine,
according to this thread. It's the smallest one with a "true" muffler if you go by the arbitrary definition I just made up requiring the exhaust use mounting bolts, a gasket, and a baffled pipe. There's even a muffler extension for it, TT part #9707, which is notable for just how esoteric a need that envisions in order to have been produced. If I win the auction, I will of course buy the extension for the muffler which is also listed and use it out of principal.
That's an Ali battery, Makita never made that style deeper than 2 parallel, Ali has them up to 5 deep holding 25 cells, which I can see the merit of as a jumbo power-bank, which I use mine as to recharge at the field, directly into the battery charger. I believe I posted a pic of that setup.
The added stature places the nozzle right at engine-height so I can just leave the heat gun on low gently warming the whole engine, particularly helpful since it was 37F last time I was out.
I scooped up a super-neat old ARF, a .25-32 Bipe, going to see if the TT F-54s fits, or maybe swap in the Asp .52 since it's nicely broken in and slightly narrower. Apparently it's from 2003, only ~130 were made and then initially sat semi-forgotten before being distributed through a limited number of "Hobby People" stores, according to
this forum post from 21 (!!) years ago. It hasn't even arrived yet, I'll make a build thread of it.
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The Mustang nears completion, figuring out how to mount the spinner has been a comedy of imperial and metric thread mismatching. The OS 62V had a 1/4-28 crank thread, same as the Asp and most engines that size, but Saito uses an M7 Crank thread. So I bought a Hangar 9 spinner nut adapter, but now that uses a 10-32 nose-bolt instead of M4. So my Avistar has a spinner nut marrying an imperial-thread crank to a metric nose bolt, and the mustang will have the exact opposite, a metric crank thread married to an imperial nose bolt, which I was able to make work by drilling out the Aliexpress 4-blade spinner and countersinking the nose "well" for the larger bolt head.
